Today, the long-assumed belief in the permanence of an enlightened world is suddenly open to challenge. To understand and counteract the threat to these ideas, we must set aside embedded explanations and embrace a new frame of observation and tolerance grounded in the power of belief, legend, and tradition.

Neera Tanden, President and CEO, Center for American Progress says “Rebuilding an Enlightened World presents progressives in America with an invaluable vision on how we can defeat the rising forces of authoritarianism and tribalism by relying on our reason and our shared values. Bill Ivey’s powerful book lays out a path for drawing upon our traditions, customs, and rich cultural heritage to help forge a brighter future—for our own country, and for people across the globe.”

July 02, 2018

Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

In honor of this historic event and current trends, we invite you to explore Transition Magazine’s 1972 conversation with James Baldwin, and a discussion of more than five decades of black action in St. Louis, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

Although the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X continues to receive the most attention, Fredrick Harris argues that James Baldwin is better situated to explain why black Americans continue to be pressed to the margins of American society.

History tells us that it takes, and that it will take, generations of striving, organizing, and mobilizing to fight for the kind of world that we want to see. And these distinct generational approaches play out in all of your work within the black liberation movement. The following excerpt is taken from a panel discussion at Harvard University on December 3, 2015 organized by The Charles Warren Center with support from the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute. Moderated by Professor Elizabeth Hinton, panelists Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers examine the achievements and challenges of more than five decades of black activism in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 by Hugh Davis Graham. Reviewed by Robert C. Smith.

Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Transition is a publication of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente.

Today marks the 54th anniversary of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - the landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

The exploration and research of black history, the study of the documentary genre, and the use of film as teaching aids (for Indiana University faculty) are just some of the contributions made by documentaries in the BFC/A collections. Spanning from the 1890s to the present day, our documentaries tell countless stories about the black experience. Because the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the mid-20th century are pivotal areas of study in the field of black history and are the subjects of frequent requests, we have compiled the following list of documentaries in the BFC/A collections that explain aspects of these movements.

The Rosa Parks Story (2002) belongs to the wave of civil rights films that emerged in the 1980s and was dedicated to recounting the fight for desegregation in the southern states. Rosa Parks quickly became an icon of collective resistance by famously refusing to forfeit her seat to a white passenger on board a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. In this made-for-television biopic, director Julie Dash strives to retrace Rosa Parks's personal and political journey to emancipation. This article considers the constraints the director had to negotiate while recounting the story of a national icon for television. Not only did the weight of legacy bear on the project, but so did the conventions of the biopic as a genre that stresses the personal rather than the political. The historical narrative of the civil rights movement is simplified into a story that reproduces stereotypes popularized by both race melodramas and mainstream media.

The independently made 1964 film Nothing But a Man is one of a handful of films whose production coincided with new civil rights insurgency and benefited from activists' input. This essay argues that the film's unusual attention to labor and gender politics as key elements both of racial subordination and liberation resulted from an unusual and productive, though not egalitarian, collaboration across racial lines. The white and Jewish filmmakers recognized the black freedom struggle in the U.S. South as part of World War II–era mobilizations against fascism and postwar challenges to colonialism around the world.

Black Camera is a journal of black film studies and engenders an academic discussion of black film production, including historical and contemporary book and film reviews, interviews with accomplished film professionals, and editorials on the development of black creative culture.